LINGUIST List 7.618

Thu Apr 25 1996

Calls: Natural Language[Extended Deadline],AAAI

Editor for this issue: Annemarie Valdez <avaldezemunix.emich.edu>

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Dear Colleagues,
The submission deadline for the AAAI Fall 1996 Symposium on
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION SYSTEMS BASED ON NATURAL LANGUAGE
is extended to May 7, 1996, Tuesday.
We revise this deadline because of the discrepancy between two
different dates, April 15 and May 1, that I mistakingly communicated
to you. If you have already submitted your paper, you can either do
nothing or send us your newest version by May 7.
FYI, I am enclosing the cfp with some revised dates.
Best wishes
Lucja
=======================================================================
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION SYSTEMS BASED ON NATURAL LANGUAGE
Call for participation in a AAAI Fall 1996 Symposium
WHERE: Boston/Cambridge, MIT
WHEN: November 9-11, 1996
shortly after KR-96 to be held November 4-7, 1996
http://www.cs.wayne.edu/nlkr
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
The Symposium addresses the theoretically and practically important
problem of knowledge representation (KR) systems that closely parallel
the representational and inferential characteristics of natural
language (NL).
Advantages of such NL-based KR systems would be enormous.
Among the arguments for the natural-language-as-KR-system approach are:
1. KR systems based on natural language would be easy for people to use,
2. Most human knowledge is encoded and communicated via natural
language, in the form of textual documents and (transcribed)
interactions (dialogs).
A NL-based KR system would be capable of automatically creating
and updating its knowledge base from natural language texts more
easily. Additionally, the contents of this knowledge base and
inferences supported by the KR system would parallel those of a
natural language user.
3. Every day, a huge number of new textual documents becomes
available on-line. This creates the need for more sophisticated
information retrieval techniques basedn natural language processing
(NLP) and KR techniques.
4. KR systems based on natural language would provide a uniform
symbolic representation. The same representational and inference
mechanism could be used when utilizing previous knowledge for
processing new natural language inputs (natural language as both
meta-level and object-level language),
5. It is hard to match expressiveness and precision of natural
language, particularly in not (well) formalized domains,
6. Many philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists believe that
mental-level representation of knowledge (human mind) is close in form
to natural language.
While some AI researchers believe that it is feasible and necessary to
design KR systems closely mimicking natural language, others are
pessimistic about success or even possibility of designing such KR
systems. This pessimism might account for the general lack of interest
in the problems of NLP within the KR community; for example, only six
of the twenty-two KR systems presented in the "Special Issue on
Implemented Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems", Charles
Rich, Editor SIGART Bulletin, Vol. 2 (3), ACM Press, 1991, are driven
by NLP concerns.
Among the arguments against the NL-as-KR-system approach are:
1. Natural language is (highly) ambiguous,
2. Natural language has (very) complex syntax, semantics, and pragmatics,
3. Natural language is non-systematic, non-algorithmic,
4. Natural language is (highly) context-dependent,
5. Natural language is (merely) an interface;
Inferencing does not belong with natural language.
The goal of this Symposium is to address in-depth such arguments for
and against designing KR systems closely simulating natural language.
We invite papers that substantiate the view that natural language can
be viewed as a KR system with its own representational and inferential
machinery, and, as such, is a productive source of ideas for KR
formalisms and their practical implementations.
We are interested in papers discussing representations and inference
mechanisms paralleling a non-trivial or interesting subset of natural
language and formal systems whose expressiveness, semantics,
information packaging, reasoning, and computational tractability
closely correspond to that of natural language.
We are interested in automatic or semi-automatic methods of obtaining
taxonomies facilitating various NLP tasks such as anaphora resolution,
inferencing, and machine translation.
We are also interested in papers that discuss those aspects of natural
language that are not desirable in a KR system. We invite position
papers with supported arguments against the idea of designing KR
systems that mimic natural language.
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
PAPER FORMAT:
Strongly preferred
12 pt article latex style
15 pages maximum, including title, abstract, figures,
but excluding references
The first page must include:
title
author's name(s)
affiliation
complete mailing address
e-mail address
phone/fax number(s)
abstract of 200 or so words
keywords
ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS are strongly preferred:
DIRECT:
anonymous ftp to ftp.cs.wayne.edu ~pub/nlkr directory
As the last resort, five hard copies of the paper
can be snail mailed to
Lucja Iwanska
Department of Computer Science
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202, USA
(313) 577-1667 (phone)
(313) 577-2478 (secretary)
(313) 577-6868 (fax)
TIMETABLE:
January 1, 1996
intent to submit due
May 7, 1996 (earlier it was: April 15 and May 1, 1996)
June 15, 1996 (earlier it was: May 17, 1996)
reviews completed
papers chosen
notification/comments/requests for changes sent out
August 23, 1996:
camera-ready papers, signed "Permissions to Distribute" forms
and A/V requests received by the chair
November 9-11, 1996:
Symposium takes place
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PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Syed S. Ali, Southwest Missouri State University
syalisy.smsu.edu
Douglas Appelt, SRI International;
appeltai.sri.com
R.V. Guha, Apple Computers, Inc.
guhataurus.apple.com
Sasa Buvac Stanford University
buvacsail.stanford.edu
Lucja Iwanska (Chair), Wayne State University
lucjacs.wayne.edu
Douglas Lenat, CYC Corp.
lenatmcc.com
David McAllester, AT&T Bell Labs
dmacresearch.att.com
Len Schubert, University of Rochester
schubertcs.rochester.edu
Stuart C. Shapiro, State University of New York at Buffalo
shapirocs.buffalo.edu
Wlodek Zadrozny, IBM TJ Watson Research Center
wlodzwatson.ibm.com